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Comment by little_goat_boy | Hacker News Reader

Have you ever employeed a programmer, or worked as one?

Stack overflow is a valuable resource. I'd be pissed if my boss told me not to use it.

I have done both. It's valuable if you are a novice and need help creating a loop or an event or something like that. If I'm paying then I'm assuming you know how to do those things. Would google hire a coder who uses Stack Overflow instead of knowing how to code without it? I cannot imagine a JavaScript coder who works for Google needing Stack Overflow for JavaScript problems.

It's unreasonable to expect people to retain knowledge of every little corner of a programming language when there's an easily available reference they could use instead.

"How often they need to refer to reference material" is a pretty terrible metric for measuring the abilities of a programmer.

Its not an unreasonable metric, if a round trip through Stack Overflow is in your thought loop then you will be significantly more limited than someone who doesn't need that. If you are doing something very obscure then its reasonable, but most programmers don't do obscure things on a daily basis.

Its similar to being unable to do math in your head. You can get away with always using the calculator but you'll be outperformed by someone who can do it without dropping their pencil.

Both will be outperformed by someone with a computer.

I hope the programmers are given computers by default :)

This is somewhat similar to the reasoning that leads people to use tiling window managers. It's more efficient than a traditional window manager so they think it makes them more productive.

They're not wrong about the first part. Tiling window managers are very efficient. They are wrong about that making them more productive, though. It certainly makes them feel more productive, but this kind of micro-optimization is solving something that wasn't actually a huge productivity problem to begin with. You can add up all the time I spend switching windows in a slightly suboptimal manner on Gnome or Windows and all of that time will be lost by an extra 5 minute coffee break or the mental deficit from sleeping less than 8ish hours a night.

Similarly, a person who doesn't have to look at Stack Overflow may seem more productive, but the tiny amount of time it takes to look something up instead of remembering it is a very, very small part of the developers day. Even if they have to do it 100 times a day it's unlikely to make any meaningful difference in the big picture.

Not needing documentation would be helpful in a world where a programmer sat down and didn't stop typing for 8 hours, but that's not the world that we live in.

How long would you estimate it takes to search your question, find the result and read the answer? I think it's optimistic to think it can be done in a minute if you actually time it.

100*1 minute is an hour and 40 minutes. That is not a trivial portion of the work day. Even if it were 30 seconds that's still almost an hour.

If that is truly a micro optimization then I shudder to think of the waste elsewhere.

The question was likely whether Stack Overflow was a requirement for coding.

Suppose candidate A tends to communicate in terms of specs and reference implementations. Candidate B tends to communicate in terms of accepted answers and discussions on Stack Overflow.

All other things being equal that should be an easy choice.

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